SUPPORT OUR
SPONSORS

Organic Valley

Dr. Bronner's
Magic Soaps

Botani Organic

Aloha Bay

Eden Foods

Ode Magazine

Mountain
Rose Herbs

The Green Guide

Agbiotech Tries to Improve its Image

The Washington Post
May 23, 2002

Cultivating a New Image; Firms Give Away Data, Patent Rights on Crops
BY: Justin Gillis

The world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies are setting up
charitable foundations, backing aid for subsistence farmers, and donating
valuable data and patents as part of a broad push to win acceptance of
genetically altered foods from skeptical consumers.

After encountering resistance in Europe and criticism around the world,
Monsanto Co. started the trend two years ago by giving away a trove of
genetic data on the rice plant that might improve a staple consumed by many
of the world's poor. Another giant agricultural biotechnology company,
Syngenta AG, is planning to follow suit as early as today by announcing that
it will turn over an even bigger cache of information on the plant.

Opposition to genetically modified food remains intense, and the
agricultural biotechnology industry is girding for battles over gene-altered
wheat, salmon, trees and other organisms. But many publicly funded
researchers, once deeply skeptical of the companies' intentions, are
impressed enough by the recent efforts to reconsider some of their views.
"I had heard so many bad stories, and actually witnessed some stuff, that I
was very skeptical when I was called to the Rockefeller Foundation two
years ago for a meeting with Monsanto," said Ben Burr, a coordinator of the
International Rice Genome Sequencing Project. "But we've had a very close
relationship. I have just changed entirely in my thinking about this."

The twin data contributions from Monsanto and Syngenta are expected to
chop several years and tens of millions of dollars off the effort needed to
produce a complete genetic map of rice, a critical step toward developing
hardier strains of a plant that feeds nearly half the world's population.
Monsanto and Syngenta spent $ 60 million assembling the rice data they are
giving away.

While the companies' new approach is a hit with some scientists, it's not
clear how much they have managed to improve their images with the public
or the financial markets. There are some favorable signs: India recently
granted approval for genetically modified cotton and Brazil may be on the
verge of doing so for altered soybeans. Gene-altered crops are still widely
planted in the United States and Canada.

A big test could come this fall. Monsanto, which lost its corporate
independence during the uproar over genetic engineering, plans to become
a stand-alone company again after being spun off from parent Pharmacia
Corp. How the market values Monsanto is likely to be seen as a barometer
of investor sentiment toward future stock offerings by "ag bio" companies.
Perhaps the biggest public test of all will come over the next two years as
Monsanto attempts to win approval of the first genetically modified wheat
plant, despite widespread concern among farmers that allowing such wheat
might taint the entire U.S. crop.

The Monsanto and Syngenta contributions to the rice-mapping project are the
biggest, but not the only, examples of the changes underway at major
agricultural biotechnology companies.

Monsanto has set up a unit to use biotechnology to help solve crop problems
faced by subsistence farmers in Africa and elsewhere. The sweet potato is a
critical staple in parts of Africa, and tests are underway of a variety,
developed with Monsanto technology, that can resist a serious affliction
called the feathery mottle virus.

Virtually every company is contributing to efforts of this kind. Syngenta is
playing a large role in developing "golden rice," an altered form of the
plant that could help combat vitamin A deficiency in poor countries. More
than 30 patent holders have agreed to donate some 70 relevant patents for
that project. In late 2001, Syngenta set up the Foundation for Sustainable
Agriculture to aid poor farmers. Others, including DuPont Co., are paying
for like endeavors.

The Rockefeller Foundation, the New York charity that sparked the "Green
Revolution" in Asia in the 1960s and thus helped to stave off mass
starvation on that continent, served as a forum two years ago for
discussions between Monsanto and its opponents. The foundation's president,
Gordon Conway, famously lectured Monsanto executives about their perceived
arrogance and unwillingness to listen.

Now, people at the foundation see improvements.
"Certainly, something genuine and real has changed," said Gary Toenniessen,
director of food security programs at the foundation. "Realizing that the
companies have got to make a profit, they've got to answer to stockholders,
I think they are being fairly open and willing to say yes to deals that
maybe in the long run benefit them but in the short run aren't going to be
much of a benefit."

In their peacemaking mood, the companies are even making peace with one
another. After years of legal battles between their seed units, Monsanto and
DuPont recently struck a comprehensive settlement that gives them access to
critical aspects of each other's technology. Howard L. Minigh, DuPont's vice
president for agriculture and nutrition, said the deal would free the
Wilmington, Del.-based company to focus on gene-altered products that
benefit consumers. One such project: soy milk without a bean-like
aftertaste.

The companies' kinder, gentler approach appears to have halted the slide in
their credibility among scientists, buying them time to try to sell their
vision of a world transformed by genetically engineered crops.
To be sure, the companies' changed attitude has not mollified their most
vocal opponents, nor has it resolved any of the serious environmental
questions that still swirl around agricultural biotechnology -- which
involves tinkering with the fundamental chemistry of life to create plants
and animals with altered traits.

Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of a Washington advocacy group called
the International Center for Technology Assessment, complained that the
companies are continuing to sue farmers when genetically engineered crops
are found growing in fields without permission. He believes engineered
plants sometimes blow in from neighboring fields as seed, and the farmers
are not always to blame.

"We're seeing more and more lawsuits, more and more investigations, more
and more problems," Kimbrell said. "There's no letting up there -- quite the
contrary."

Jeremy Rifkin, a technology critic who has been one of the sharpest thorns
in the side of the companies, calls the fight a struggle over "who controls
the biological inheritance of the food of the world."

He believes the battle is far from over, noting that the companies still
face public skepticism and lawsuits, including a large antitrust suit that
he helped organize. But he concedes that the companies have gotten smarter
in their public relations.

"If I were thinking like them, I would try to do whatever I can in the short
run to put my best foot forward," Rifkin said. "I think they're trying to
put out small fires that come along while they keep focusing on the big
confrontation to come."

Once fairly sleepy businesses that sold drums of chemicals to farmers, the
companies in the 1980s jumped into one of the hottest fields in science.
With Monsanto in the vanguard, they realized they could use the techniques
of genetic manipulation -- to a large degree, the same laboratory techniques
that are permitting researchers to tackle diseases such as AIDS and cancer
-- to solve generations-old agricultural problems.

Monsanto rolled out the first products in the mid-1990s, including
insect-resistant cotton and potatoes, as well as corn and soybeans designed
to tolerate an herbicide used to kill nearby weeds. The products, especially
the soybeans, were a huge hit with farmers.

But in retrospect, the companies had left a critical factor out of their
calculations. They saw their customers as the farmers, not the final
consumers who would buy the food the farmers grew.
Longtime warnings from skeptics such as Rifkin gained little attention in
the United States, but in 1999 they began to take hold in Europe, a
continent already jumpy about food safety. Street marches and newspaper
headlines about "Frankenfood" ensued.

"All of a sudden the arguments of the activists had much more traction than
they ever had before," said Rob Horsch, one of the first scientists hired at
Monsanto to work on genetic engineering. "Suddenly it was real."
As the backlash mounted, Wall Street fled in a panic, undermining the
companies' ability to raise capital. The proud Monsanto, based in St. Louis,
got bought up by Pharmacia Corp., mostly for the value of a highly
successful human drug the company had developed called Celebrex.
Syngenta, in fact, wouldn't even exist but for the backlash. Novartis AG and
Astra-Zeneca PLC, pharmaceutical companies eager to shed agricultural
divisions that had suddenly become hot potatoes, combined them in 2000 to
form Syngenta, based in Basel, Switzerland.

In the four years the controversy has been unfolding, little evidence has
come to light to support fears about the safety of bioengineered food, and
American government agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration,
say they are safe.

But the long-term environmental impact of the crops remains a serious
question. Many scientists wonder whether foreign genes inserted into crops
can spread to the wild relatives of those plants, doing some kind of
unforeseen environmental damage.

In fact, several incidents have suggested that the ag bio companies,
whatever their intentions, won't be able to control where their altered
genes wind up. Agricultural biotechnology's biggest debacle to date occurred
when an altered crop called Starlink corn, approved only for use as animal
food, turned up in the human food supply, forcing widespread recalls of taco
shells and other products.

That mess forced all the biotechnology companies to pledge never to put a
crop on the market for animal use only, because it would be certain to wind
up in the human food supply. For similar reasons, many American farmers are
worried about Monsanto's efforts to commercialize a genetically engineered
wheat. The farmers, though they may support biotechnology in principle, are
afraid the altered wheat will taint the entire American crop in the eyes of
foreign buyers.

The European backlash has cooled somewhat as governments there adopted
labeling laws and barred imports of gene-altered ingredients. In the United
States, by contrast, foods using gene-altered ingredients are common on
grocery shelves. For instance, products whose ingredients include "soy
protein" often rely on genetically engineered soybeans.

With the controversy still simmering, it's clear the current strategy of the
ag bio companies is to try to be good corporate citizens while they wait for
the public to adjust to genetic engineering.

The approach was outlined most clearly in a speech given in late 2000 by
Hendrik A. Verfaillie, Monsanto's president and chief executive. Admitting
that Monsanto had been blinded to public concern in its enthusiasm for
biotechnology, he pledged a series of steps to improve the company's conduct
and vowed that Monsanto would "behave honorably, ethically and openly."
One of the early examples of the new approach, cited in Verfaillie's speech,
was Monsanto's decision to contribute its rice data to the International
Rice Genome Sequencing Project. Now, Monsanto's data set has become a
critical resource for international researchers.

Syngenta, which recently published a preliminary genetic map of the rice
plant in the journal Science, is planning to announce a similar contribution
as early as this morning. Neither company has a strong commercial interest
in rice, which is grown mostly in poor countries, but they have been pouring
millions into researching that plant because it is a "model organism" for
all crops descended from wild grasses, including wheat, barley, oats and
sorghum.

Toenniessen, of the Rockefeller Foundation, said he was grateful for the
spirit of cooperation he is seeing from Monsanto and Syngenta. But he also
noted that both companies combed the rice data for potentially valuable
genes, and filed some patents, before turning the data over.

"They've been mining that resource base as fast as they could," he said.
"Despite all the rhetoric, these companies still are in the business to make
money."